michaelboy

On Friday we started a new strength workout at rowing practice, and between that and a rather spicy Saturday morning practice, it's a wonder I got as much done the rest of the day Saturday as I did (to wit, grocery shopping, then I don't remember what).

Thankfully by Sunday I felt rested enough I could continue chipping away at various projects. It also helped that the warmer daytime temperatures persisted, more or less (more like 40°F than 50, but we'll take it!!).

So, back to Oar Factory mode.

These are now up to their third coat of paint:


They look pretty good from a distance, but there are still some surface imperfections I'm not entirely happy about.

I have gotten several things sorted out, but have some additional refinements to make to my painting process. Among the things sorted out is my paintbrush cleaning/management technique, since stashing the brush in the freezer really didn't work for me (gaps are too long between painting sessions). I have a jar full of used mineral spirits, where the old paint gradually settles out. So when I'm finished painting, I pour the supernatant into a separate jar, then pour a fraction of that into a plastic tub. I work the paint out of the bristles over a series of 3-4 mineral spirits pours, then I use a brush spinner to spin the excess mineral spirits out of the brush. From there I head to the basement and clean out the mineral spirits with warm water and dish detergent, and hand-spin out the water. I wound up losing or misplacing the original packaging for the paintbrush I'm using, so instead I am wrapping it in brown paper to keep the bristles together as it dries. This all leads to a much better painting experience for each coat of paint.

For surface prep, I found that it's definitely a good idea for me to use rubbing alcohol and the right sort of rag to wipe off the sanding dust between coats, otherwise I get some terrible bits of grit in the paint.

I got some brush-on primer for this whole project, and this is the first set of oars where I've tried using it. For the next set, I think I need to apply two coats of the primer because just one coat was too thin and I can still see the underlying color irregularities on the blade surface. It turns out that the last person to paint oars used spray primer; my understanding is that it winds up being more expensive to do that. But if I don't get satisfactory results with the brush-on primer, I'll switch back because the spray primer is way easier (and fast) to use.

Meanwhile, in the Oar Repair Factory (aka basement)...

Most of my last round of epoxy work turned out pretty well! With a little bit of sanding, 3 of 5 blades are now ready to paint. There was one major exception, which was where I tried to rebuild some of the surface of blades where years of scraping against the dock wore the blades down through the carbon fiber. In those cases, my rebuilding attempts did add fresh surface, but there were small voids left behind as the epoxy settled onto the surface underneath the piece of polyethylene plastic. So in this case I figured heck, why not experiment, and basically just painted on a layer of epoxy to try and fill the voids.





This isn't going to be perfect, either, but hopefully it will give me enough surface material to sand things basically flat.

Really, this would be a great situation for some peel ply, but I don't have any at the moment, and it might be a while before I put in an order to a place that carries it.

In general the best news is that for the first 2 pairs of oars I finished painting a while ago, I also finally finished adjusting them to the correct length and inboard, so they are finally ready to go back to the boathouse! I am going to work on a series of driving errands on Tuesday to transport heavy and bulky things, so I'll be able to get them moved out and will pick up the next 2 sets soon.

I am also thinking I might be able to create a porch configuration that will let me work on 4 sets of oars at a time with overlapping painting cycles. Good stuff. It has been frustrating to have stalled out on this project for so long.

But for now, time to head in to the ant mines paper-grading mines...

Oh, one really random question: do any of you know of a good source of cotton terrycloth fabric, most ideally in orange? (I guess I could dye it, too). I want to use cotton terrycloth to make oar blade covers for when we go to regattas, but terrycloth seems like a tricky item to buy online.